Alec Baldwin says he's done with media

In a 5,284-word essay for New York magazine, as told to Joe Hagan, the actor said "goodbye to public life" and said he's moving to California.

Speaking for my fellow Californians, I can say ... so?

Baldwin wrote in the Feb. 24 issue, "I've lived this for 30 years, I'm done with it."

He also wrote "I loathe and despise the media in a way I did not think possible. This is the last time I'm going to talk about my personal life in an American publication ever again."

Of course it is.

According to E! News, 55-year-old Baldwin then detailed his "(expletive)" 2013.

Alec Baldwin from "30 Rock" holds the the Best Actor in a Comedy award, in the press room during the 2009 Emmy Awards at the Nokia Theater in Los Angeles on September 20, 2009 (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images))

"I find myself bitter, defensive, and more misanthropic than I care to admit. And I'm trying to understand what happened, how an altercation on the street, in which I was accused -- wrongly -- of using a gay slur, could have cascaded like this," he wrote. "There's been a shift in my life. And it's caused me to step back and say, 'This is happening for a reason.'"

Right. It's happening because Alec Baldwin is a jerk.

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Baldwin referenced an incident in November when, by his account, a TMZ photographer "ambushed me as I was putting my family in a car, and I chased him down the block and said, ' (expletive) sucking mother (expletive)' or whatever (when I have some volatile interaction with these people, I don't pull out a pen and take notes on what I said)." Calling celebrity website TMZ's founder a "cretinous barnacle on the press," Baldwin asked "Do people really, really believe that, when I shouted at that guy, I called him a '(expletive)' on-camera? Do you honestly believe I would give someone like TMZ's Harvey Levin, of all people, another club to beat me with?"

He later wrote, "I get angry, and I've said all sorts of things in anger, but I'd never use that word."

The word in question was, of course, a gay slur that rhymes with "maggot."

Baldwin wrote "Am I a homophobe? Look, I work in show business. I am awash in gay people, as colleagues and as friends. I'm doing 'Rock of Ages' one day, making out with Russell Brand. Soon after that, I'm advocating with Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Cynthia Nixon for marriage equality. I'm officiating at a gay friend's wedding," he wrote. "I'm not a homophobic person at all. But this is how the world now sees me."

No. It mostly sees you as a self-absorbed jerk who somehow manages to eclipse the enjoyment many of us get out of your work by writing things like this.

Whoops -- sorry.

Baldwin wrote he was "labeled a homophobic bigot by Andrew Sullivan, Anderson Cooper, and others in the Gay Department of Justice." He also referenced when his wife, Hilaria Baldwin, was accused of tweeting during James Gandolfini's funeral. He admitted calling the Daily Mail reporter who wrote that a "toxic little queen." He called Cooper "the self-appointed Jack Valenti of gay media culture. I didn't feel bad about the incident. He lied about my wife."

Somewhere, actors who manage to go years without appearing in a tabloid -- like Harrison Ford -- shake their collective heads and chuckle.

Baldwin acknowledged "there's an impression that I'm someone who seeks to have violent confrontations with people. I don't. Do I regret screaming at some guy who practically clipped my kid in the head with the lens of a camera? Yeah, I probably do, because it's only caused me problems."

Baldwin also addressed his MSNBC talk show "Up Late," which didn't do well in the ratings. "My goal was always to take a talk show to the network," he said. "I never wanted to be on MSNBC."

The network suspended and later fired Baldwin after the TMZ incident.

Since he was talking about MSNBC, Baldwin accused MSNBC host Rachel Maddow of pushing for his firing and called her "a phony who doesn't have the same passion for the truth off-camera that she seems to have on the air."

The 40-year-old political commentator responded via BuzzFeed's Kate Aurhtur on Sunday, tweeting, "I have never met Mr. Baldwin, either on camera or off-camera. I wish him all the best."

Don't we all?

Mr. Happy also tackled his issues with Shia LaBeouf, with whom he briefly worked on the Broadway play "Orphans." LaBeouf was fired and replaced by Ben Foster.

LaBeouf "seems to carry with him, to put it mildly, a jailhouse mentality wherever he goes," Baldwin wrote. "I'd heard from other people that he was potentially very difficult to work with, but I always ignore that because people say the same thing about me. When he showed up, he seemed like a lot of young actors today -- scattered, as he was coming from making six movies in a row or whatever."

"He had that card, that card you get when you make films that make a lot of money that gives you a certain kind of entitlement. I think he was surprised that it didn't work in the theater."

Baldwin wants to start over in Los Angeles.

"I did not have a happy family life a few years ago. I was divorced (from Kim Basinger) and I was very alienated from my daughter (Ireland Baldwin) and I was out there cutting every ribbon and running around New York hosting events for different causes to supplant my loss, because I didn't have a family to go home to. Now I don't want to be Mr. Show Business anymore. I want the same thing everybody else wants. I want a happy home, and for the first time in my adult life, I have one," he wrote. "I love my wife more than anything in the world and I love my child (Carmen, 6 months) more than anything else in the world and I don't want that to change in any way."